In reply to Mike's last ....Yes, archeological analysis is one way to go
... but data is sketchy I think. Another is via anthropology, not on the
old assumption that less differentiated societies of recent times are the
same as ancient ones, but on the "back-breeding of maize" analogy, that we
find some alternative lineages descended from the same precursors if we
look not just across cultures in general, but specifically across those
that have incorporated urbanization, long chains of sociotechnical
translations, etc. to different degrees or in radically different ways.
At this point I am looking for leads and suggestions, not yet for definite
answers ...
On the other recent topic:
I don't think the human brain is likely to have changed physiologically
over the timescale of historical changes in culture. That's not plausible
evolutionary biology; even today literacy skills barely make a difference
in reproductive fitness (of individuals; it's different if we are talking
about group selection, but those are weaker effects that take even more
generations ...) and there is only a tiny fraction of the species
population that has been literate in the last few thousand years ...
negligible. I won't try here to anticipate the various arguments around
pre-adaptation and gender differences in brain evolution. Maybe there is
something interesting to discuss there ...
It just strikes me as strange that people are always looking for some
genetic, physiological, or evolutionary basis for culture-shaped behavior
and cultural change. This is a really odd fetish ... What is it in our
current dominant culture that is so drawn to biological determinism? Did we
jettison racial/eugenics theory too soon? before it had run its course?
What is the ideological driving force for this line of reasoning? I think
this is a really important question for contemporary cultural studies. Is
it some deep reflex of the culture's fear of sexuality? or of middle-class
repression of anxiety over the vulnerability of our bodies to pain? Is
there a meta-Freudian analysis of the Will to Bio-determinism? (Sigmund did
start out as a bio-determinist himself, and this tension between what one
might call the appeal to the body and the appeal to a more culturally
shaped psyche stays all the way through.) I think the relative behavioral
significance of the cultural veneer on our primate heritage is often
exaggerated ... but so is the potential impact of that heritage on
variability in the veneer.
What is more credible to me is that the brain has all along had incredible
plasticity and that _use patterns_ can "wire in" various sorts of
dispositions and structures that make some things easier than others ...
this is consistent with Edelman's arguments in _Neural Darwinism_, and
there has long been evidence (reviewed in an interesting and overlooked
book by E. Milner ... hmm still in a box somewhere ...) that the gross
plasticity is still being shaped well past adolescence, likely into our
mid-30s. Could this have correlates with gender-specfic aspects of
enculturation? possibly .... with hemispheric specialization? seems less
relevant, but also possible ... though I agree with Mike that the
correlation between gender roles and literate vs. say pictorial facility in
and across cultures seems too weak to be very plausible ... for one thing,
you need a very sophisticated understanding of the relations between spoken
and written language to develop such arguments (also a weakness in some of
David Olson's literacy and culture arguments in _The World on Paper_).
Gender-role enculturation certainly gives women in our society a strong
disposition to verbal fluency and effectiveness in situations defined more
as social than political, more as private than public (though these
categories are themselves a bit ridiculous and incoherent even within our
present dominant culture) ... and the differences there vs. literate forms
of semantic construction, and their supporting dispositions, while
significant, are still rather slight on the scale of differences in
brain-processing or hemispheric differentiation. It would hardly be
adaptive to have hemispheres, even in post-natal ontogeny, become
specialized to such fine-grain variations in discourse pragmatics.
Of course we could always do brain-scans, and maybe even invasive
cortical-structure probes, on post-operative transsexuals ... do you think
John Ashcroft would have a problem with that ??
JAY.
At 08:46 AM 12/20/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>Lets hear from the historians of ancient Summerian schooling, Jay. I have
>only read a few books on Ancient schooling, and not nearly enough on the
>evolution of city-states to be able to contribute to a discussion of the
>emergence of schools in the middle east. China is another, very important,
>locale. Perhaps in Goody's work or work he points to?
>mike
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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